So why do people have children? One motive, certainly, is to prove to yourself and the world what a fine parent you can be. This endeavor begins with the belief that your child will carry the best of your genes. Most adults are quite pleased with the kind of people they are, even if they feel their qualities are not fully appreciated by the wider world. Hence the hope that passing on your traits and aptitudes will produce a superior child, and you will be able to share in the acclaim he or she receives.
After conception and birth, parents are expected to transform a howling infant into a motivated adolescent and an accomplished college applicant. Most also want their children to make more of their lives than themselves. Thus much of parenthood involves devising a game plan to ensure that one’s child will surpass his or her schoolmates. This includes spending large sums of money on lessons and activities associated with winning, ranging from music and sports, computing and martial arts, along with efforts to get the child into advanced placement classes and programs for pupils identified as gifted. Indeed, the main reason for migrations to the suburbs is to send children to schools that will serve as springboards to recognized colleges and a higher social status.
In a word, parenthood has become a competition. If some children are deemed winners, others are seen as losers, even if that term is seldom uttered aloud. For example, a dozen elite colleges listed in the next chapter had only 15, 577 freshman places in 2000, not nearly enough for all the parents who want to say that their Jennifer is at Duke and Jason is at Stanford. The public sector is almost as selective. In California, Berkeley rejected 21,599 of its 30,042 applicants, while UCLA turned down 25,385 out of 35,681. In North Carolina, its flagship campus at Chapel Hill mailed 6,178 admission letters and 10,635 expressing regrets. Investments in private schooling or well-off suburban systems can’t be said to have paid off if one’s offspring end up at lower-tier colleges who’s names aren’t quite as impressive.
Part of the problem is that demand exceeds supply by a wide margin. The United States now has a larger upper-middle class than ever in its history. In 2000, the Internal Revenus Service received returns that reported incomes of at least #100,000 from 10,856,126 households. While not all had college-age children, some did and they were among the losing competitors for Dartmouth and Berkeley and Chapel Hill.
So what happens when children do not succeed? When asked what a son or daughter is doing-and people do ask-here is what some not wholly fictional parents may find themselves saying:
He’s a carpenter up in Vermont, and he’s really happy and he says he’s truly found himself.
It’s a small liberal arts college in Indiana, which has excellent internship programs.
She’s building a good life for herself and the girls, now that her ex is out of the house.
One cannot miss the tone: plaintive, defensive, embarrassed. By middle-class American measures, these children are-not to mince words-failures. And the fault must lie with the parents, whether through inadequate genes or insufficient encouragement. “Where did they go wrong?” they feel others asking-and they may be asking themselves the same question. So they work on how they’ll respond, as others hold forth on their neurosurgeon sons and investment banker daughters.
What is being described here is the side of social mobility that is seldom discussed. For most escalators that move upward, there will be another one going down. Even in prosperous periods, when the majority of society is doing well, there will be children who sink below the status they enjoyed while growing up. After all, even the best-placed parents cannot guarantee that their energy and intellect will be passed on. A suburban education may get a child into Princeton, but after that she’ll be on her own. Many Ivied graduates end up with middling jobs, and then find themselves replaced by more talented men and women from less auspicious origins. This process has been called “regression to the mean”, wherein offspring of successful parents turn out to be quite average in character and accomplishment. This can happen even in favored families; indeed, that’s where it usually occurs.
- Andrew Hacker, Mismatch, pp. 74-75
I thought to try a little experiment here at The Obsidian Files, a combination of Book Club and Open Mic Night if you will. Over the course of the next few weeks, I thought to, each Friday, take a book off the shelf, find a provocative passage, quote it, and simply hand off to you, my esteemed readers, to do with it what you will, with minimal commentary by myself. I figure its a good way to kickoff the weekend, and depending on how things turn out, it may become a permanent feature of the forum.
The above passage touches on many points and raises many questions. Feel free to address them as you will.
Let er rip!
The Obsidian
